2007 - Roxanne Karimi, Dartmouth College

Superfund Research Program

The Superfund Research Program (SRP) is pleased to announce Roxanne Karimi, Ph.D., of Dartmouth College, as the recipient of the 10th Annual Karen Wetterhahn Memorial Award. Karimi received the award on December 4, 2007 at the 20th SRP Annual Meeting in Durham, North Carolina, as a result of her outstanding contributions to metals research, specifically the accumulation and cycling of heavy metals within freshwater organisms, food webs, and ecosystems.

Karimi earned her Ph.D. in 2007 from Dartmouth College, and her B.S. in biology in 1996 from the University of Pennsylvania. Karimi was a trainee of the Dartmouth SRP Training Core, and participated in the interdisciplinary activities of the program, including science, education, outreach, and mentoring. In her repertoire of accomplishments, she has mentored several undergraduate women, through Wetterhahn's Women in Science Program (WISP), with regard to their individual independent research projects.

"The Superfund program has provided an ideal environment for enabling me to address my research interests by providing an interdisciplinary framework for my graduate training. In each sector of my research, I have infused basic concepts of ecology with theory and techniques from other disciplines, including toxicology, biogeochemistry, and environmental health."

-Roxanne Karimi

Karimi's graduate research encompasses the broad differences in the eco-physiological processing of diverse elements as they directly apply to the management of ecosystems toward contaminant reduction. In the future, Karimi hopes to continue her research on the biological function of different metals, and their importance to environmental quality and human health. She also intends to extend her research to marine organisms, such as copepods and bacteria and to examine the dietary sources of metals to humans.

Currently, Karimi is working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Consortium for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research at SUNY Stony Brook (New York). Her recent research examines levels of contaminants (mercury), and nutrients (omega-3 fatty acids), in seafood species, human exposure from seafood consumption, and associations with health factors, including autoantibody concentrations.